El Salvador And The Mirage Of Security: The Dangerous Bukele Model

By Carmen Navas Reyes

News Americas, WASHINGTON, D.C., Mon. May 18, 2026: The apparent widespread popularity of Nayib Bukele’s government (regime) acts as a sophisticated media smokescreen. Under the guise of effectiveness lies the deliberate dismantling of the rule of law and the deepening of social precariousness that the regime attempts to render invisible. Physical security, achieved through the permanent suspension of civil liberties, is a mirage that sacrifices social justice and due process in favor of a one-man hegemony and becomes a kind of war on the poor, paradoxically endorsed by them.

In El Salvador, following the governments of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) between 2009 and 2019 and amid security crises stemming from the civil war and the actions of gangs (maras), the public swiftly shifted from these progressive governments to granting carte blanche to a new brand of authoritarianism in exchange for a sense of state control. The Salvadoran government’s marketing has perfected this transition, masking repression by stigmatizing any criticism as support for crime. Legitimacy no longer stems from law enforcement, and high popular support is politically capitalized upon to eliminate checks and balances.

According to data from the April 2026 survey by CB Consultora Opinión Pública, Nayib Bukele (El Salvador) leads in popularity in the region with a 70.1 percent positive rating (down from 71.8 percent in March), while Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil) has 48.4 percent support, and is seeking a historic fourth term amid strong polarization (49.1 percent disapproval), and Gustavo Petro (Colombia) has a 38.2 percent approval rating, in an electoral landscape featuring a possible second progressive-leaning administration under Iván Cepeda, against a backdrop of rising violence in the country in recent weeks.

This approval of Bukele has been exploited to validate attacks on the thesis of the left’s ungovernability in the region and to force direct changes to the constitutional framework in order to prevent the emergence of a new left-wing or progressive Salvadoran government. Based on this popular support, the ratification of the amendment to Article 248 of the Constitution took place in January 2025, which paved the way for the July 2025 amendment that enabled Bukele’s indefinite presidential reelection.

The Institutionalization of the Permanent State of Emergency

Under Bukele’s governance, fear has shifted from being a threat posed by gangs to a tool of state social control. The State of Emergency, extended continuously throughout 2025, has ceased to be an emergency measure and has become the very structure of public life. Justice has been replaced by a logic of internal war where the presumption of innocence is a thing of the past, yielding alarming statistics: more than 90,000 people detained, daily quotas for arrests by the police—who must meet a minimum number of detentions based on discriminatory profiling (tattoos, racial profiling, etc.)—an incarceration rate of 1,650 people per 100,000 inhabitants (the highest in the world), more than 470 documented deaths of people in state custody due to causes related to torture, beatings, and denial of medical care, as well as forced disappearances, such as the case of the 252 Venezuelans illegally transferred to the CECOT.

In this regard, the 2025 criminal justice reforms represent a step backward for the justice system across the region; a prime example is the law allowing the prosecution of minors as young as 12 as adults, including the possibility of life imprisonment and the implementation of mass trials. Likewise, an improper judicial reserve has been established, concealing proceedings under a veil of opacity that makes due process impossible, thereby creating prisons of horror, precariousness on the streets, and deliberate terror to silence any dissent.

Poverty and Displacement Under Bukele’s Government

The success narrative of the Bukele model crumbles when confronted with the economic reality of the working classes. Physical security has not translated into human security; on the contrary, the model has driven authoritarian gentrification in several Salvadoran cities. The imposed marketing has prioritized the aesthetics of order and luxury tourism over basic subsistence, according to a 2024 World Bank report that has even sought to downplay these figures under the security paradigm:

Poverty rose to 9.6 percent in 2025, demonstrating that punitive measures do not address the structural causes of inequality.

Educational crisis and state neglect with the closure of 44 public schools and the dropout of 25,000 students, driven by a lack of infrastructure and harassment by state security forces in rural areas.

Forced evictions and social cleansing of 1,400 informal vendors in San Salvador, under the banner of tourism and mining megaprojects.

The Criminalization of Criticism and Sectors of the Salvadoran Opposition

The Bukele government has identified human rights organizations and critical voices as internal enemies, using the criminal justice system to dismantle resistance. The persecution has targeted emblematic figures; some have been forced into exile, while a significant number have been prosecuted: Ruth López (Cristosal), detained on arbitrary charges; Fidel Zavala, spokesperson for the Human Rights Defense Unit, detained and held in Mariona Prison at high risk of torture; Alejandro Henríquez and José Ángel Pérez, criminalized for their complaints; Enrique Anaya, a constitutional lawyer who was the victim of a temporary forced disappearance while being transferred between facilities without official record.

The case of the Foreign Agents Law, which imposes a 30 percent tax on social organizations and grants the executive branch the discretionary power to revoke legal status, constitutes another example of persecution, establishing that the defense of human rights is today an act of heroic resistance in El Salvador.

The Salvadoran experience indicates that for the right, immense media popularity does not take into account whether human dignity is systematically degraded, as long as the banners are the struggle for security, freedom (in the terms of Javier Milei, in Argentina), and order—regardless of whether this is built upon the persecution of the poor, the criminalization of children, and the elimination of leftist or progressive dissent. This model deepens inequality by punishing the most vulnerable’s economies. Bukele’s ‘order’ is an exclusionary structure that requires a media apparatus of censorship and propaganda to prevent discontent from turning into mobilization. This model of ‘pop authoritarianism’- which sacrifices fundamental human, political, social, and economic rights – poses an imminent danger to our countries: electoral campaigns seeking to emulate Bukele in Colombia or Brazil, in an election year, are receiving various forms of support from the so-called Shield of the Americas.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Carmen Navas Reyes is a Venezuelan political scientist with a master’s degree in Ecology for Human Development (UNESR). She is currently pursuing a PhD in Latin American Studies at the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American Studies (CELARG) in Venezuela. Researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

SOURCE: Globetrotter